


Built of Autumn Roses

by melannen



Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Aliens, Immortality, Loneliness, Other, Time Travel, Xeno, sga_flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-23
Updated: 2005-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:38:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back home she'd often described what she did, working for peace, as keeping a single light burning against the darkness. Here in the Pegasus galaxy, the darkness devours the light, and becomes all the stronger for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Built of Autumn Roses

**Author's Note:**

> For the sga_flashfic darkness challenge. *Somebody* had to write about the Darkness. (That is, spoilers for "Hide and Seek" and "Before I Sleep".)  
> The title and mood of this story were borrowed from Ezra Pound's poem "Sub Mare".

Elizabeth feels a bit silly, lighting a candle to keep the entity away, especially after Rodney turns on his flashlight. Well, it is a bit silly, and so was Teyla telling the children that it was afraid of fire. The thing eats energy, and it's hungry: fire will only attract it and feed it. Back home she'd often described what she did, working for peace, as keeping a single light burning to drive away the darkness. In the Pegasus galaxy, the darkness devours the light, and becomes all the stronger for it.

She lights the candle anyway. There's something about a cheerful candle flame that's friendlier, more alive, than all the gene-activated panels, filigreed atria, and, especially, dead plants in the city.

When she sleeps in her new quarters, she dreams about dead trees, white leafless branches creaking ominously over her, gnarled limbs lifeless yet still restless for the winter. When she wakes up, eyes blinking in the dimness, she half expects to find that she has been taken by a Wraith overnight, and left white-haired and parchment-brittle and hungry. She pulls herself out of bed and lights the candle again. In the few minutes she has before the rest of Atlantis wakes up and calls for her attention, she sits in front of it in stillness and remembers calm ceremonies that opened long days of negotiation, intense discussions in smoky cafes in Morocco and Pakistan, Teal'c meditating, spending a quiet evening with Simon in his airy apartment in California. That morning, the room's Ancient lights never switch on.

The Athosians have a fire-starting technology that is advanced enough to look like magic. It's a small defiance against the Wraith; they may light their tents with torches, but they light their torches with hand-held lasers. Elizabeth asks Halling to show her how it works one afternoon when there are no urgent emergencies in progress, and he's glad to do it. To them, fire, like faith, is simply a part of what is; it's not going to keep the Wraith away, but they value it anyway, because they need it to live. She manages to get the candle lit after putting only a few scorch marks on the white Atlantean wall, but when Peter pages her to Ops, she gives the thing back to Halling gladly. It reminds her too much of footage she's seen of Goa'uld hand devices.

When they've finally settled in enough to catch their breath and have time and energy for such things, and the scientists have analyzed their samples, they gather all the dessicated houseplants from the cleared areas of the city and pile them up to burn on one of the piers. The botanists say it's amazing that there's anything left identifiable, after ten thousand years, and a miracle that there's still something like wood. McKay suggests a weenie roast. She shakes her head before Ford or Sheppard can agree. There's something here that requires solemnity, that they are releasing these dead things that are all that remains of the life that once filled Atlantis with learning and hope.

Teyla starts the blaze with her fire-maker, a red bolt of energy leaping from her hand. Halling sings a solemnly joyful chant in the language of the Ancients while the children sit around them, watching. Then Beckett steps forward, and in a surprisingly sweet voice, sings the forty-second Psalm in the antique Latin of the Roman Mass. Elizabeth hasn't spent much time in church since she was nineteen and her grandmother passed away, but she translates silently as he sings: "For you, God, are my strength; why do you turn from me, and must I wander in darkness, afflicted by enemies? Send out your light and your truth, for they have led me and brought me to your holy hill and your dwelling place." The Latin is not so far distant from the Ancients' tongue that the music of it has changed, and the Athosians listen intently; Teyla nods incrutably to Halling. "As it was in the beginning, and is now, and always will be: World without end. Amen."

The wood is old, old beyond old, and it flares up dry and bright into the starry sky over Atlantis. But the time has altered it, or maybe dwelling so long in the sea, and it crackles and sparks well into the night with eerie flames of blue and green and purple.

***

It's a while before Elizabeth notices. Long enough that she's stopped counting, and only keeps track of the passage of time by gray hairs and twinges in her joints. Long enough that taking a day, or two days, to wander the city seems worth the span of life she spends for it.

She's only ever seen the city when it was full of desperate motion, the last flurry of activity before the end. The expedition had barely had time to turn the lights on before the water crashed in, and she'd seen the Ancients only in the last stages of their evacuation, as everyone rushed to make things ready before the shield failed and the Wraith came. They barely had attention to spare for one lonely traveller from the future; they couldn't carry everything with them. Even the potted trees that line the corridors were left behind. A few of them were even still alive the first time Elizabeth woke.

But now Atlantis is quiet, empty, still. The trees are bare and dry; the corridors are white and sterile. It reminds Elizabeth not so much of winter at home as of the eternity of Antarctica, where winter has measured itself in millions of years, enfolding itself in ice since the first days of the Ancients. All of her people's busy efforts at the outpost had affected that immensity not at all.

It is a comfort to her, under the skin: she is not sure if she will ever truly wake again, either. The repetitive dance of switching out the ZPMs is as familiar and as meaningless as the endless dreams of green kelp, and ice, and golden light; of cages and loneliness and hunger and waiting. The corridors of Atlantis stretch on as unchanging and unmerciful as the corridors of sleep. She activates a computer console just to prove to herself that cause and effect still apply, and even the city map it brings up is dark and empty: everything in the city is turned off, powered down, hibernating. She pages through layer after layer of readings as much for the hypnotic motion of it as anything. Once, the monotony is broken by the dim light of something that is still running, drawing its own power, shining like a beacon from the other end of the city. It pulls at her curiosity, and for years she dreams of that marker, pulsing in the darkness, a lure of siren song in the city under the sea.

The next time she wakes, after she does what she's here for, she heads for that light, under the flimsy justification that she needs to exercise her body before she sleeps again. It's in a lab on the other side of the city, and as she walks there, even the stagnant air of the passages that have been millenia without breath is vivid on her skin.

The documentation she finds for the active device says that it's a containment vessel, which traps a creature more ancient than the Ancients, intelligent and strong and nearly Ascended, which hunts and absorbs all energy, mercilessly. They say that it is no more than a vicious predator, too alien and too single-minded and self-contained to communicate with.

Elizabeth doesn't believe that there is anything she cannot bring to a dialogue. Forget Afganistan and Indonesia: she has negotiated a deal with Time and Destiny themselves. A cloud of ravenous darkness is not beyond her.

She isn't mad enough, yet, to set it free, but she sinks to the floor below the cage, her unfamiliar aged body protesting at the hard floor, and talks to it, the same way she had made friends with her neighbor's cat when she was twelve. Talks quietly and meanderingly about whatever comes to mind. The sound of any voice, even her own, is unfamiliar, and most probably it gentles her as much as it does the creature, but she convinces herself, after a time, that she can sense it listening. She stays there, talking to the only other living thing in Atlantis, until her throat is very sore and thirst drives her back to her chamber.

She still dreams of green water and light and cages and fear: but now she is not alone. There is a darkness dreaming beside her which embraces her in stars.

***

It's completely unexpected, when it finally happens. The Place has been slowly waking up for days, but she still sleeps, swimming relentlessly up from death. The first thought of freedom is to leave, to go home, but there is light in the Place now, three blazing furnaces of it, and little warm ones moving around. It is easy to feed on them, to make them sink back into darkness. It is wrong, wrong, after the long slow passage of time, for them to bring light, to so desecrate this timeless cold memorial of defeat.

There is no desire to go back to the cage, but there is, all at once, no desire to leave either, where they had dreamed together for ten thousand years; to stay and grow strong and lap the whole city in darkness.

Now they have turned the lights off again and it is cold and dark as it should be. Now there is a sudden flare of energy, bright and sharp and endless, no more to be resisted than her voice in the night had been: they have opened the Gate.

There is another of her there, but this she is sharp and still brittle and bright. She holds a tiny warm flame before her. She does not try to talk. She has not yet learned failure, she has not yet learned acquiescence. She will light a blazing fire and burn all of the cold out of the Place.

It is not so hard to turn and go.


End file.
